Afghanistan war veteran Jesse Murphree pets his service dog, Jasper, at his Westminster home last month. Among other duties, Jasper helps Murphree cope with his PTSD. Murphree was featured in the film “The Current,” shown at the Boulder International Film Festival. (Lewis Geyer, Times-Call)

March 19 marked the anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a time to reflect on the consequences of this conflict at home and abroad.

Our just-published book chronicles soldiers’ returns to southern Colorado from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. From PTSD to the ways multiple deployments challenge whole communities — families, schools, healthcare networks, and efforts to process all of this in face-to-face dialogue — we narrate a “tale of two cities,” the relationship between Colorado Springs and Fort Carson.

We also tell a tale of two cultures, tracing the contours of what some call the military-civilian cultural gap.

How did a study that began focused on PTSD become a book that urges readers to go beyond that medical diagnosis? When we were called in 2008 to interview a battalion of Fort Carson infantrymen back from a second hard tour in Iraq, it was specifically to explore how stigma tied to unseen wounds like PTSD might prevent soldiers from seeking help.

Through our interviews, however, we noted that many would virtually roll their eyes when the topic of PTSD came up. We grasped how many soldiers treat PTSD within their ranks with suspicion. As one put it, “There are more people that claim PTSD and don’t actually have it than people who have it and don’t seek treatment.”

It wasn’t that they didn’t believe something like PTSD existed. “Anyone who served with us has to have it, really,” another soldier said, “but we aren’t the ones claiming it.” Military personnel also grow suspicious of media coverage, bloggers, and activists’ attention to PTSD because they may feel it is being used as proxy for critique about the wars, or of the military itself.

Meanwhile, mental health providers worried about “bracket creep” (the standards of diagnosis growing ever looser), such that “secondary” or “vicarious” PTSD is increasingly being claimed and diagnosed in military family members traumatized by deployment’s impact from home, as well as by service providers to service members and veterans.

And whether or not combat and deployment experiences manifest in PTSD or other problems, reintegration itself, apart from mental injuries, poses significant challenges to soldiers and the families and communities from whom they have been separated. Many young adults who enlisted as adolescents are integrating as civilians for the first time.

While medical diagnoses like PTSD are expected to bring a politically neutral framework to post-deployment casualties, we found this applied only in the therapeutic context itself. Overall, the topic of PTSD in public discourse emerged as exceedingly fraught: ambiguous, controversial, and inescapably politicized. One soldier said, “The problem with PTSD is that it lets everyone put everything about the wars onto the individual soldier.”

We suggest a shift in the way we narrate war for ourselves. Beyond war stories centered upon the individual male hero’s journey, we offer a collective, mind-boggling labyrinth, a tangled plurality of many standpoints and stories both local and global, and lurking with variable, minotaur-like threats and fears.

In so doing, we submit that coming back from war entails dismantling the compartmentalization that war creates, between “us” and our “enemies,” between “here” and “over there,” between soldier and civilian, between “their” war and “our” war. War as labyrinth defies separation and insulation: It means that global echoes of war’s violence reverberate and affect us all, and that they necessarily follow combatants home.

From a singular focus on PTSD as “the” unseen wound of war, we have asked “What else do we also need to understand?” From versions of public engagement with war based on civilians-as-audience whose job is merely to listen, we have called for reciprocal military-civilian interchange, and for civilians who shoulder responsibility.

In dwelling considerably on PTSD even as we urge readers to also go beyond it, we argue the diagnosis means something distinct for afflicted soldiers and the clinicians who treat them from the meanings it takes on in wider public discourse. The unprecedented challenges presented by protracted wars and multiple deployments, and serviced through an all-volunteer force, create a circumstance in which what is good for treating individual bodies afflicted by PTSD — individualized, mental health treatment — may not be the best prescription for the collective, social body, where nations and communities must reckon with war in all its components.

American communities must be called to attend to the moral dimensions of suffering, healing, and the divisions within and between communities affected by war. War is already so multifaceted, involving control over and access to resources, conflicting cultural values, biological drives, and environmental conditions. When we try to to suggest that we can predictably manage it to attain a favorable cost-benefit result, we are blindsided.

Stigma surrounding PTSD and physical disabilities resulting from the wounds of war differs from stigma associated with how military occupational specialties become ranked in ways that are gendered (and “classed,” “raced” and so on). Stigma assigned to civilians and civilian life as undisciplined, indulgent and weak is something still again.

We conclude that stigma in its myriad forms is better understood as one of many ways that humans manage terror. Terror is an existential dilemma that we all face, on battlefields and in domestic life alike; it reminds us of our mortality and fragility, and that trauma is always, everywhere, potentially just around the corner. Even at home, violence on a scale approaching what soldiers face in war plagues many communities. In war, violence takes on sharpened, particular forms. Terror, stress, and trauma punctuated by waiting and boredom become “normal” parts of life, no longer buffered by the relative regularity of domestic culture. Life is intrinsically hard; where we have choices about the use of war and violence it is best to consider carefully how we might avoid compounding the terror.

That we use culture to manage terror — the global war on terror being only the most pronounced instance — may be in part hard-wired, an aspect of our evolutionary adaptation for survival. But how we frame culture and the paradigms we use are things we can and do change. On an individual and community level, the army’s efforts to fight stigma associated with war’s invisible wounds so that soldiers and veterans seek help is an important step.

Equally important are establishing effective, evidence-based clinical treatments complemented by a variety of community-based programs that reintegrate soldiers into civilian life and extend hands across the military-civilian divide.

But by themselves they are inadequate. We must also ask ourselves: How will we manage terror culturally, as a nation? If we condition a segment of our citizens, many already troubled by violence, declining economic opportunities, and poor education, to exercise lethal force, and repeatedly place them in embattled contexts where they become subject to and agents of violence, blowback at home and abroad is inevitable.

Soldier-perpetrated crimes, whether the murder cluster tied to Fort Carson soldiers or massacres at Fort Hood and a distant Afghan village, may not be wholly isolated events. They form a pattern of violence spilling over from the sanctioned use of lethal force. Once again, the labyrinth of war forces us to view these events as part of a global whole.

We maintain that civilian disengagement with the plight of our service members and the campaigns they serve is dangerous. Checks and balances are an essential component of a vibrant democracy. Soldiers frequently told us that they had been mis-trained for what they were asked to do on deployments. Many soldiers, especially those in the junior enlisted ranks without a college education, find that military experience does not always translate into similarly well-paying jobs in the civilian workforce.

At the national level, as we maintain a sizeable standing army (albeit much reduced from its greatest size in World War II), we must feed it, clothe it, equip it, and find things for it to do. This distracts attention and resources from honing other skills, maintaining infrastructure, investing in public education, and other national pursuits that have made us a strong nation.

In a globalized world where national boundaries are increasingly porous, human security is essential in creating national security.

Sarah Hautzinger, Ph.D., teaches anthropology and feminist and gender studies at Colorado College. Jean Scandlyn, Ph.D., teaches in health and behavioral sciences and anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver.